NBA All Star Weekend begins and Blake Griffin loses a friend to cancer. "When reporters entered the locker room after the [Timberwolves] game, Griffin's [head] was in his hands after receiving a phone call and he was sobbing. Griffin, who is scheduled to compete in the dunk contest on Saturday, did not speak to reporters."

Edmonton: Soldier sentenced to 12 months for punching gay man and bragging about it on Facebook.

Marsha Ambrosius discusses her new album and the fantastic new video for "Far Away". "For two openly gay males—black males at that—to be shown in [that] light was a very surreal moment for many. A point in making the video was to [show] they were happy and in love and open to loving one another in front of whomever, and to establish their relationship outside of what the world thought; they thought the world of each other."

07 July 2007

· A weekend of bloody violence in Iraq. More than 150 people are killed after a powerful truck bombing in a Turkmen-Shiite town near Kirkurk and at least two dozen die after car bombings in Baghdad. The Iraqi parliament has proposed a no-confidence vote on Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki before its August vacation.

· Violence on the streets of Budapest. Several hundred skinheads and right-wing agitators threw rotten eggs and smoke bombs to disrupt the gay pride parade. This comes just days after cabinet minister Gabor Szetey becomes the first governing politician in Hungary to publicly come out as gay.

· John Edwards invokes the cautionary tale of Howard Dean: "Money will not decide who the nominee's going to be. Everyone will remember Governor Dean who outraised everyone else by more than 2-to-1 and wasn't able to win the nomination."

· Durex says 200 adults Australians—men and women—are needed to test its newest line of condoms.

· A Jamaican psychologist defends her nation's entrenched and violent homophobic culture: "We have a reputation to uphold and our reputation is that we are homophobic and anybody who come with it is going to be knocked down."

· Judge overturns the temporary suspension of a San Francisco police officer whose whose amateur videos were "denounced by city officials as racist, sexist and homophobic." The officers taped skits that mocked blacks, Asians, gays, lesbians and transgenders. One parodied a white police officer in a patrol car running over a black homeless woman.